Sunday and Monday the building is usually dark or has a hire in — weddings go on Sundays, filming and rehearsals on Mondays. Tuesday and Wednesday are for load-ins, maintenance and the two-hundred-and-eighty bulbs in the sign, which need a ladder and a patient person roughly once a week. Thursday is most often the seated show. Friday is a live gig until eleven and then Keep The Faith from ten in the other configuration, which is the single hardest turnaround of the week and takes eleven people forty minutes. Saturday is a live show, then The Late Bill until four in the morning. The crew are back in at ten on Sunday to reset the room, and it starts again.

We are open every bank holiday weekend and they are usually the busiest nights of the year. The building closes for a fortnight from Christmas Eve, which is the only time all year the bar is dry and the only chance the crew get at the floor. It closes again for two weeks in early August, when the maple gets re-sanded in alternate years and the rig comes down for inspection. Both closures go on the mailing list in advance and the box office answers the phone through them, because somebody is always in the office doing next season’s bookings.

Halifax station is a nine-minute walk: out of the front, left along Horton Street and up Ravenscliffe Road, and the lit sign is visible from the bottom of the hill. The last train to Leeds is 00:23 and the last to Bradford 00:41, which is exactly why the live curfew is eleven — you can see a full headline set and still make the platform without running. There is no parking on site. The Portland Street multi-storey is four minutes away and free after six, and the taxi rank on Crown Street runs all night on Fridays and Saturdays. The 501 and 504 both stop at the end of the road until half past eleven.

The window is quietest between two and four on a Tuesday and a Wednesday, and close to unusable in the hour before doors on a Saturday, when the queue runs down the pavement and whoever is on it is also checking wristbands. If you need somebody to actually think about your question — an access booking, a name change, a hire date, a refund — ring at the quiet end of the week and you will get a proper answer from somebody sitting down. If you just want a ticket for tonight, come to the window; it is faster than it looks and there is never a booking fee. The phone diverts to an answerphone when the box office is shut, and it genuinely does get listened to the next morning.

It has happened eleven times in thirteen years — nine illnesses, one flood on Ravenscliffe Road and one van that never made it out of Glasgow. The moment we know, it goes on the mailing list, on the door and on the phone message, in that order and usually within the hour. Every ticket is refunded automatically, including the booking fee, inside five working days, and you do not have to ask or fill anything in. If the show is rescheduled your ticket carries over and stays valid, and you can still have the refund instead if the new date does not suit — just ring. If you have travelled and found the door shut because we could not reach you in time, tell us, and we will cover the train.